Learning at Dartington
Our legacy of progressive education continues to inform our learning programme: from craft courses and post-graduate studies for adults to schools’ programmes for children.
Our colleges
Transformative learning through postgraduate and short course options – all delivered by world-class tutors in a truly unique campus experience.
Schumacher College
Schumacher College has developed an international reputation for transformative nature-based learning. They offer small class sizes, in an intimate setting, on courses relating to ecology and sustainability.
Working from a campus nestled on our 1,200-acre estate, the College welcomes students from more than 80 countries who wish to join the search for solutions to some of the most complex problems facing our planet.
Come to Schumacher for short courses and postgraduate study – and be inspired by leading thinkers, practitioners and activists of our age.
Dartington Arts School
Our rich international heritage and spectacular rural location provide a dynamic and responsive context for contemporary study at Dartington Arts School.
We offer a distinctive learning community where students and tutors learn in dialogue with each other and with the place itself, and learning is delivered on a small, friendly scale with intensity and rigour. As a testbed for enacting new visions and models, Dartington has a uniquely values-driven vitality to offer to its learners.
Driving creativity
Our renowned Summer School and established craft programmes offer a wide range of opportunities to learn and develop new and existing skills – in a truly stunning setting.
Summer School & Festival
Every year, Dartington Music Summer School & Festival delivers four weeks of shared music making, learning and listening, from early music to classical to jazz.
The Summer School is for everyone – professional musicians, music students of all ages, people who love to play, sing and write and people who love to listen.
By day, classes and courses covering a range of music take place; by night an extensive concert programme, featuring internationally renowned performers, lights up the Dartington estate.
The Craft Revolution
The Craft Revolution runs a vibrant craft programme of courses, projects, events and talks, and also facilitate the The Shippon Studios, a thriving makers space on the estate.
Collaboration with over 50 makers from across the South West and beyond has resulted in an exciting and popular range of courses in carpentry, furniture, textiles, ceramics, printmaking, bookbinding and artisan cookery.
It is a movement about making; a learning space, an ideas lounge, an action station. A story of ‘doing’ over ‘not doing’.
Progressive enterprise and schools programmes
Our social enterprise programmes help over 1,000 people a year develop ideas to tackle society’s biggest problems – and for young minds, our Deer Park programme delivers outdoor learning with a difference.
SSE Hub Dartington
Our programmes can provide the support you need to progress your enterprise – whether your business is established, just starting out or still at the ideas stage. That support might come in the form of funding, learning opportunities, workspace, or something else entirely – but if you’re someone who wants to make a difference in your community, we offer a range of opportunities to explore.
Deer Park Programme
Thanks to support from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Ernest Cook Trust we are able to offer a schools’ heritage learning programme based around our Deer Park – a very special place where history, nature and learning come together.
The Park has a 700-year-old story to tell: about the people who lived here, the magnificent landscape, the deer themselves and the abundant wildlife. Our learning programme brings all this and more to life through a creative, exciting approach that complements the school syllabus.
Even more…
For courses delivered by Schumacher College, the Summer School and our Deer Park Schools Programme, please follow the links above.
You can also book courses through our events booking system – which includes those run in partnership with some of our tenants on the estate. These include:
Arts Lab
Arts Lab CIC is an artist-run social enterprise that connects people with visual art and artists to help build happier and more connected communities. Working in partnership with Dartington Arts from a large studio in the heart of the Dartington Hall estate, Arts Lab provides a programme of events for workshops, exhibitions, talks and residencies, a research hub for artists, and outreach for youth, health and prison services, schools, colleges, refugee projects and local businesses.
art.earth
art.earth grew out of the Language, Landscape & the Sublime symposium which took place in June 2016 at Dartington Hall and Sharpham House, and exists as a space for thought, for making, for collaboration and for conversation.
art.earth celebrates and supports artists who look outward. This might mean quite explicitly talking about environmental or ecological issues, or it might mean a much broader sense of the ecological: something that is open, enquiring, caring, and considerate of the world (people and places) it inhabits.
Soundart Radio 102.5 FM
Soundart Radio is an independent, non-commercial, licensed community radio station based on the Dartington estate and reaching audiences locally, nationally and internationally.
They run a regular series of courses, often for young people, providing opportunities to learn more about radio broadcasting.